Wood and food

We were having a leisurely lie-in this morning planning what we might do for the remainder of the day when we had a phone call from Christos (of Christos's Taverna in the village and also the new petrol station just beyond Gravity Road) that he was delivering our wood.  We had expected him this afternoon!  So we had about 20 minutes to get decent and to get ourselves galvanized into action!

John was packing the wheelbarrow and bringing it into the garden to outside the woodstore and I was inside the woodstore stacking in the space that had been allocated to this load which is to be burned next Winter.  

I usually end up with a stacked slope rather than filling the whole space so today I was taking my time and being careful to choose the logs so that they fitted in the space and I had them stacked back to front and side to side so that they would be unlikely to spill out.  I got so far and then it was all too high for me so John had to take over.  

It was a good load of mixed wood which included carob, almond, walnut and olive but no pine - John doesn't like pine!  All the pieces a decent length to fit in the wood-burner but varying width.  John was happy with it and when Christos went down to Arodes John with a load this afternoon Arodes John was happy with it too which was good.  

It was an unexpectedly bright and sunny day today, for the whole of the day so after completing my wood stacking exercise I decided that I would spend some time in the garden having a tidy up.  The recent frosts have meant that a couple of the plants outside, unaccustomed to such low temperatures, have taken a bit of a battering and look like they have 'melted'.  I don't know if this means they wont recover, I suspect that will be the case but I have cut them back and moved them so I can keep an eye on them and will leave them to see if they recover.  The forecast for the next week is very changeable indeed so it was good to make the most of a lovely day today to get some of the dead leaves and straggly plants tidied up.

Mum is coming for lunch tomorrow.  We had bought some lovely old fashioned braising steak at Shuks the other week and I had been given some kumquats which I know Mum loves.  I had found a recipe for slow cooked beef with ginger and orange and I decided to replicate that but use the kumquats instead.   I used the recipe here as the base for my meal leaving out anything that I know Mum doesn't like eat like garlic and I will probably not tell her it is a 'fusion' dish because she will make her mind up before she has even tried it!  John was making the pudding - he had seen something on tintyweb for an easy sweet so we were having an apple and ginger pie with grated pastry topping. 

For our supper this evening we were having crispy pork stirfry using a tenderloin from Shuks and serving it with egg noodles again as we had both enjoyed it like that in the week.  In fact I would go as far as saying that this has become our latest favourite supper and it is quick and easy and oh so tasty and quite inexpensive even though we did splash out on mange-tout!  I think I posted the recipe before but if not you can find it here.

Here is the finished article.  John said he couldn't begin to tell me just how good it was so at least that made up for the disappointment of the England Rugby Team chucking away a win against the Scottish in the six-nations or the woeful performances of the speed skaters in the Winter Olympics!  I left him to watch the late night boxing matches and relaxed in bed instead!!!